A forum for the print and digital publishing industries

Four decades after debuting as an insert in a 1978 issue of Playboy, Food & Wine’s 40th Anniversary campaign celebrates not only its 24,000 published recipes and its collaborations with world-renowned chefs, but also the year of growth the brand experienced across its digital, social, video, events and print platforms.

From a purely commercial perspective, user traffic is the main resource produced by digital news publishers. Most established news publishers mainly convert this resource into revenues by selling advertising and exposing their own paid-for journalism to potential subscribers.

It was only a matter of time before publishers’ commerce operations started to get a little more programmatic.
Over the past year or so, a number of publishers, including Purch, MSN, Wirecutter and Allure have been experimenting with making the links in their commerce content biddable, adding a layer of automation to a normally human-powered process.

Though the UK’s vote to exit the EU and the election of Donald Trump may have roiled the British and American public, both have been great for subscription sales. Stories of the readership surge caused by the Trump Bump and the Brexit Bounce are legend among audience development professionals.

In the early days of digital publishing, publishers and ad networks were free to load up their sites with ads anywhere on the page without a thought for whether or not they were going to be seen. According to some analysts, this left more than 50% of ads delivered online going unseen..

In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve entered an era of on-demand media consumption. And due to its mobility and being a natural accompaniment for multitasking, audio has emerged as a favorite among the on-demand public.

It’s not especially groundbreaking to report that teens are largely abandoning books and magazines in favor of smartphones. What is notable about the American Psychological Association’s new report on adolescent media use in the U.S.—one of the most comprehensive studies of its kind to date—is the accelerating rate at which its findings indicate screen time is displacing legacy media consumption.

Engagement time is defined as the total time a page is open and a user is deemed to be active, and it’s what forward-looking publishers are starting to focus on instead of looking at more ‘traditional’ viewing metrics.

Engagement time is defined as the total time a page is open and a user is deemed to be active, and it’s what forward-looking publishers are starting to focus on instead of looking at more ‘traditional’ viewing metrics.

So you’ve mostly been a print publisher up until now. Maybe you’ve added a couple new revenue streams like a special edition book and a sponsored event or two. You know it’s time to really put some focus on digital ad sales. But where do you start without getting overwhelmed by the vastness of all things digital?.

In a time when fakery seems to expand to every corner of the internet (including fake Amazon product reviews and YouTube views), it seems like academia is the last bastion of unadulterated truth, right?

The Washington Post, The Guardian and Mic have discontinued their chatbots, according to their spokespeople. Others such as Business Insider and The HuffPost appear to have done the same, as evidenced by their Messenger accounts not responding to messages or directing people to email them instead.

Although magazine media got plenty of attention earlier this year due to the blockbuster deals made by Meredith and Hearst to acquire Time Inc. and Rodale, respectively, as well as the ripple effects each deal caused, the months that followed were relatively quiet. And as the expression goes, no news is good news.

So we’re agreed? Reader revenue is the way to go. We’re over traffic-at-scale and ad-only funding models. Subscriptions probably won’t pay all your bills, but a healthy mix of subs and ad sales is what we’re all about these days.

Recently, many online publishers woke up to welcome news, with vast jumps in the size of their estimated audiences. For example, Australia’s Daily Mail more than doubled its audience in the space of two months

Meredith’s Shape magazine spent the last year thinking over and creating its own evolution. Shape, which is published 10 times a year, reaches a rate base of 2.5 million and an audience of 14 million across platforms, focuses on healthy living for the 21st century woman.

Condé Nast, the company behind Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, became one of the world’s most successful magazine publishers with a formula built on a heady mix of old-world glamour and all-American pizazz.

For the first time in its 45-year history, Dennis Publishing has been sold. The London-based publisher of The Week and Mental Floss, among numerous others, has been acquired by British private equity firm Exponent, both parties announced Tuesday.

Apple’s subscription business is already big, but it’s about to get even bigger. Apple has sold more than 300 million subscriptions to its own and others’ apps, an increase of more than 60 percent in the past year alone, Apple CEO Tim Cook said during the company’s latest earnings call on July 31.

Recently, many online publishers woke up to welcome news, with vast jumps in the size of their estimated audiences. For example, Australia’s Daily Mail more than doubled its audience in the space of two months.

Publishers are starting to realize the unharnessed value of an engaged email database and how it can increase digital revenues. An opt-in email newsletter list can be one of your most valuable assets—because then you own the relationship with that reader.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab introduced ads.txt last year to help ad buyers avoid illegitimate sellers who arbitrage inventory and spoof domains, following calls from across the sector to clean up the supply chain.

Pete Spande said ad agencies seem to be looking at him differently these days.
In the past two weeks, the chief revenue officer of Business Insider said he’s had first-time conversations with many of the video and TV-buying groups at the agency holding companies. He said those talks are happening in part because BI started using Nielsen’s Digital Content Ratings to measure the size of its digital video audience.

There’s an old saying that, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
I goofed. I’ve been advocating the use of a “hammer” to help magazines reverse a decade-long advertising slump. I should have been talking about what we need to build.

A few months ago, I was asked to attend a conference to speak on the direction and future of newspapers. Then, a month ago I was approached by a different association asking if I would consider being a keynote speaker for their convention; the subject was once again about the future of newspapers

Last month, Folio: celebrated the Top Women in Media awards and highlighted achievements made by over 100 women across the industry. From Up & Comers to Corporate Champions, these women have done everything from achieving new revenue streams for their companies to building new brands from the ground up, and Jeanette Bennett is no exception.

RockYou Media continues to fine-tune its pivot from social gaming to digital publishing.
The 13-year-old company has been attempting to make the shift over the past few years, but its efforts really began to take shape in November 2017 when it launched Vocally, a digital publication for multicultural millennial women that RockYou Media CEO Lisa Marino described at the time as the company’s “first non-game proof point in a business model we have spent the last three years developing and scaling.”

It’s a message we’ve been hearing percolate through the industry now for years: programmatic is the future of advertising. Brands, in search of more control over their media buying activity, have embraced technology-based approaches that promise efficiency, precision, flexibility, and superior ROI.

Facebook is giving advertisers new ways to show off their products, including with augmented reality. At its F8 developer conference earlier this year, Facebook announced that it was working with businesses to use AR to show off products in Messenger.

CommonWealth magazine, the 22-year-old quarterly published by Boston-based nonpartisan think tank MassINC, is going all digital. The Summer 2018 issue, out today, will be CommonWealth‘s last, editor Bruce Mohl revealed in the issue’s editor’s letter, arguing the magazine will more effectively serve its organizational mission—that is, coverage of the policy debates that impact lower- and middle-class Massachusetts residents—by devoting the bulk of its funding to its growing digital channels..

By now, everyone understands the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is here to stay, and businesses must make themselves entirely compliant in order to avoid fines of up to four percent of total global revenue.

Your mom might not know who Daquan is or what Goalslayin is about, but a lot of teenagers on Snapchat do — and Snap wants to work with the companies and creators behind these brands. Take London-based Fanbytes. The 18-month-old digital media company has four organic accounts on Snapchat — MakeupTuts, Goalslayin, Couples365 and IRelateQuotes.

I am going to suggest something crazy: Objections are actually good in the digital ad sales process. I say this because almost every sales call will have some. It’s going to happen. And those objections can teach you a lot about what your prospect really needs.

Lead management is a general marketing term that describes the process of optimizing lead-based marketing activities. Most of these marketing activities typically entail modern, inbound strategies for producing sales leads or “hot” prospects.

Publishers have historically touted ecommerce as a golden opportunity to increase their topline revenue. In this age of digital disruption, where major platforms like Facebook, Google and increasingly, Amazon have asserted their dominance, publishers of all sizes have had to work hard to reconfigure their business models to adapt.

Showcase houses aren’t a new concept for shelter magazines. Generally viewed as a natural—and expected—extension of a brand, it’s not atypical at this point for a magazine to participate in the nearly three-decade long trend by building part or all of a house of its own.

The DoubleClick brand is going away, along with AdWords. In their place are three new brands: Google Ads, which now identifies what was AdWords, Google Marketing Platform, which encompasses Google’s products for enterprise advertisers, and Google Ad Manager for large publishers.

For publishers, getting quality traffic to their online properties is itself quite a big challenge, especially in the current environment of turmoil in the digital landscape. Next month onwards, things might get even more difficult for some.